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Chicago Trip Recap

My husband and I are definitely foodies, but we equally love traveling! When we are going on trips, we love visiting local eateries and places we've heard about from Food Network. You may have read our Cincinnati foodie recap, or our NYC recap from our honeymoon. Our anniversary was a couple weeks ago and we celebrated it with a weekend trip to Chicago!

Below is a recap of our quick weekend trip, and all the delicious food we ate along the way!

Friday

Once we landed in Chicago, we started the day off with some Chicago deep dish pizza! My husband is quite the pizza aficionado, so he of course did his research. There are obviously a ton of deep dish pizza joints in the Windy City, but one caught his eye - Lou Malnati's. This pizza joint has been in business for decades and is an iconic Chicago restaurant. It was also featured on an episode of Throwdown with Bobby Flay. The pizza definitely lived up to its hype!

My delicious pepper and onion deep dish pizza!

After the pizza, we headed over to Wrigley Field, to watch the Cubs take on the Nationals. My husband played baseball for years, and loves catching a game when we can.

We ended the day at another restaurant featured on Food Network - Bavette's. The restaurant is a speakeasy theme with amazing food! The restaurant had an interesting ambience - it was dark and candlelit with soft music playing in the background. It's very popular and we weren't able to get a reservation! We got there early, though, and were able to quickly get a seat. The unique and hip restaurant had a lot of hype, and we weren't let down! My husband enjoyed steak frites, and I got the delicious fried chicken with spicy hot sauce.

We decided not to get dessert there, but walked around and shopped some on Michigan Ave. While shopping around we found my favorite cupcake shop - Sprinkles!! The owner of Sprinkles is Candace Nelson, the judge on Cupcake Wars. We got a pack of four to try throughout the weekend. I tried the Red Velvet (my favorite) and the Vanilla with Strawberry buttercream. My husband tried two different chocolate cupcakes - one with chocolate buttercream and one with vanilla buttercream.

Saturday
When we are on trips, we try to avoid any national chain restaurants, or anything we can easily get at home. It's pretty easy for lunch or dinner, but sometimes harder for breakfast. But, we looked around and eventually saw a pancake place we had to try - Wildberry Pancake and Cafe. The restaurant has tons of unique flavored pancakes, including the ones we tested out - S'more and Cinnamon Roll. We had to wait about 45 mins, but it was worth the wait! It might not have been the healthiest breakfast...but it was quite tasty. We worked it off with lots of walking anyway!

My scrumptious s'more pancakes

My husband's cinnamon roll pancakes

After our breakfast, we headed over to tours of two magnificent theaters - Oriental and Bank of America. I've actually seen shows in the past at both theaters, so it was great to do an in depth tour to learn more about the history of both!

Inside the beautifully ornate Oriental theater

The smaller, but equally beautiful Bank of America Theater

After our tour, we headed out to a sandwich joint close by, Al's Italian Beef. This is another restaurant featured on TV, this time Man vs. Food. It wasn't necessarily my favorite stop of the trip, but it is a great Italian beef sandwich.

After lunch, we headed over to the Museum of Science and Industry. On the way over we were looking at the exhibits, and noticed there was a traveling Disney exhibit, I was so excited!! There was so much cool stuff from Walt Disney's past and lots of costumes and memorabilia from a wide range of Disney movies.

Original costume pieces from Mary Poppins

In the middle of the exhibit, they had an Animation Academy where they taught us to draw Mickey and Donald! We are certainly not going to be Disney animators any time soon...but it was fun to do!

Animation Academy - Learning to draw Donald

We did manage to get in some science while we were there - we visited aviation, storm, train, and submarine exhibits.

Sunday

We decided to have a light breakfast with coffee and bagels and headed over to the Willis Tower for an early morning view of the city. The tower even has some glass-floored balconies which puts you 1,353 ft above the ground. It's really cool to stand out in the glass landing, but a little disorienting!

Beautiful view of the city from the Willis Tower

We then headed to the pier and ate at an Italian restaurant. Afterward we were on a search for a cannoli before leaving for the airport...but we never found one. During the search, though, we found a delicious donut shop - Glazed & Infused. We tried the Red Velvet and Vanilla Bean, both were amazing!

Sadly, after that delicious pit stop we were on our way to the airport and headed back home. Our trip might have been quick, but it was an enjoyable (and tasty) getaway!